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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (201578)	9/6/2006 1:16:50 PM
From: Ichy Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

How do we know that after all pakistan got a pretty sweet deal, and so does Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and they have for 20 years.

To: bentway who wrote (201578)	9/7/2006 1:56:06 AM
From: Elroy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

There isn't any significant Muslim influence in the Bush admin., so, you can't find any. And since Muslims worldwide and in the USA outnumber Jews, can we conclude that Muslims are making less of an effort than Jews to influence policy in the US? You can have your views on the influence of Jewish people on the US government, but as long as their activities are legal, there nothing wrong with influencing the US government. You shouldn't get upset with them because they are successful - instead perhaps you should get upset with whoever opposes their influence for failing to succeed in their efforts to resist their influence. This is something that I find hard to understand. There are legitimate moral and economic justifications for opposing the overwhelming, one sided US support for Israel. Why are Muslims, especially with oil hovering around $70, unable to get their side of the argument into US policy discussions. I see it as a failure on their part. They can hire lobbyists, donate to political campaigns and do whatever it takes to influence US policy, but apparently they don't. It's not fair to object because the pro-Israel lobby is just good at what is supposed to do....

To: bentway who wrote (201578)	9/7/2006 1:57:20 AM
From: Elroy	Respond to of 281500

Here's an article on the subject from today's news. America needs a massive jolt By George S. Hishmeh, Special to Gulf News gulfnews.com How does Israel manage to get away with murder? This American expression is often used whenever one gets away without punishment for "a blameworthy act", as was Israel's 33-day war on Lebanon which has left more than 1,100 people dead, a third of whom were children and over 3,500 injured. Lebanon's Hassan Nasrallah, the new Arab hero and head of Hezbollah, has publicly admitted that he would not have taken the two Israeli soldiers as hostages the border incident that touched off the Israeli bombardment had he known Israel would unleash a war that virtually demolished the southern part of the country, some neighbourhoods in Beirut and key bridges and installations, and especially Lebanon's recently upgraded Beirut International Airport. Moreover, about one million Lebanese left their homes in the south and Lebanon's tourism industry has been virtually decimated. Israel is also undergoing some introspection although not much is expected from the two commissions of inquiry appointed by the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Alex Fishman, writing in Israel's leading newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, expects this exercise to be "the mother of all whitewashes". But the Israeli press, to its credit, is another matter. In fact, a Lebanese-American journalist, Mounzer Sleiman of Almustaqbal Al Arabi, told an audience at The Palestine Centre in Washington in reply to a question about US media coverage of the war that he wished his American colleagues paid attention to the critical Israeli media. The British newspaper, The Independent, observed sarcastically: "There are two sides to every conflict unless you rely on the US media for information about the battle in Lebanon. (I, for one, had to follow the BBC to get a clearer view of the war.)" The absence here of any American self-examination of the pro-Israel role the administration had adopted in allowing Olmert to proceed unchecked, hoping that Israel would crush Hezbollah's resilient fighters, is unfathomable if not disgraceful. The least one would have expected at this time is serious reassessment of the Bush administration's missteps that contributed to its failed policy in the region. A large part of the blame for the absence of any introspection lies on the broad shoulders of the US media which had failed to evaluate the major turnaround that has taken place as a result of this 33-day war that has lasted longer than any of the previous five wars between Israel and its Arab neighbours. In the shadows, there is a growing fear that Israeli right-wingers may now wish to even the score by turning their guns on Hamas in Gaza. Cautions Kathleen Christison cautions (www.counterpunch.org) "all Americans who do nothing to end US support for Israel and its murderous policies to recognise that we stain ourselves morally by continuing to sit by while Israel carries out its atrocities against the Palestinians." The former political analyst who worked for 30 years at the CIA and is author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession, continued: "A nation that mandates the primacy of one ethnicity or religion over all others will eventually become psychologically dysfunctional. Narcissistically obsessed with its own image, it must strive to maintain its racial superiority at all costs and will inevitably come to view any resistance to this imagined superiority as an existential threat." Israeli columnist Gideon Levy notes in Haaretz that "in the last two months, Israel killed 224 Palestinians, 62 of them children and 25 of them women. It bombed and assassinated, destroyed and shelled and no one stopped it. No Qassam cell or smuggling tunnel justifies such wide-scale killing. A day doesn't go by without deaths, most of them innocent civilians". He added: "At Shifa Hospital, the only such facility in Gaza that might be worthy of being called a hospital, I saw heartrending scenes last week. Children who lost limbs, on respirators, paralysed, crippled for the rest of their lives." But there aren't enough writers yet in the mainstream media to turn the tide around, even when Americans are not aware that their governments have since 1972 cast 33 out of 72 vetoes at the UN Security Council to shield Israel from international criticism, censure and sanctions. But John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago political science professor and co-author of an earth-shattering study on the Israeli lobby, has cited recent US polls to conclude that "there's a marked asymmetry between how Americans think about Israel and the recent conflict in [Lebanon] and what the US government has done." If true, America may be waking up. But time is short, America needs a jolt.